FORSETH: No, climate change isn't making the weather worse

During the parliamentary debate on the carbon tax, when cornered, the Liberals raised the spectre of increasing extreme weather and fires burning across the country. I am reminded of “liar, liar — pants on fire" when Trudeau resorts to his reference to Canada on fire, to justify his carbon tax.The April discussion bulletin from the Fraser Institute is worth the read that debunks Trudeau's lazy assertions about "fighting climate change" and the spectre of fires and floods. The report is courageous, as it challenges the accepted political assertions. There will be a harsh response directed at the researchers. Environmental drama stars can’t abide the thought that their script has been story time, rather than science.We have heard politicians, international celebrities and environmental activists say that man-made climate change has already brought — and will continue to bring — vastly more extreme weather events. The disaster list is fairly lengthy: flooding, drought, heat waves, cold snaps, more frequent and intense forest fires, more frequent and intense rainfall/snowfall and more frequent and intense tropical storms.Assertions are made claiming that weather extremes are increasing in frequency and severity, spurred on by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. And, based on such simplifications, governments are enacting ever more restrictive regulations on Canadian consumers of energy products. These reactionary misguided policies impose hurtful costs to the Canadian economy and exert a downward pressure on Canada’s standard of living.According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, evidence suggests that some types of weather have become more extreme, particularly those relating to temperature trends. However, many types of extreme weather show no signs of increasing and in some cases are decreasing.Drought has shown no clear increasing trend, nor has flooding. Hurricane intensity and their number show no increasing trend. Globally, wildfires have shown no clear trend in increasing number or intensity, while in Canada, wildfires have been decreasing in number and areas consumed from the 1950s to the present.While media and political activists assert that the evidence for increasing harms from increasing extreme weather is iron-clad, not so fast. Read the real numbers. Claims about extreme weather should not be used as the reason for committing to long-term regulatory regimes that hurt the hard-won standard of living, leaving the next generation worse off.The Fraser Institute analysis casts doubt on claims that extreme weather events are becoming more common, arguing such assertions by governments and media outlets are not “iron-clad.” The authors also raise concerns that world leaders are using “extraordinary claims” about the earth’s climate to justify environmental beliefs, thereby abandoning capitalism and eliminating fossil fuels. The report recognizes that capitalism and fossil fuels made it possible for societies to shift from manual labour in agriculture, develop technologies leading to longer life spans and reduced infant mortality and improve democratic participation.When it comes to droughts, the Fraser Institute points out that the IPCC has “medium confidence” that numbers are increasing. The underlying evidence for such claims is “clearly mixed and inconsistent,” says the report, citing 2021 International Energy Agency data suggesting drought severity in Canada from 2000 to 2020 was only slightly above the global average.While the IPCC says floods have “likely” increased since 1950, the report says trends show a “high regional variability and lack overall statistical significance of a decrease or an increase over the globe as a whole.” It also cites Canada’s Changing Climate Report in 2019, which found there did not appear to be “detectable trends in short-duration extreme precipitation in Canada for the country as a whole.”The extremist rhetoric by the government is not justified. Language such as “climate crisis” or calls for extreme actions to “combat” climate change are overstated. Evidence for observed changes in drought, flooding, tropical cyclones and hurricanes, fire weather and others is spotty, globally non-uniform, of varying levels of quality, duration and area coverage. Measured trends in flooding, drought, wildfires and hurricanes, have in fact, been seen to decline over all or parts of the time IPCC claims to have observed increases.Extraordinary claims and coercive policies imposed on the public require extraordinary evidence. While there is evidence that Earth’s atmosphere is warming moderately and that there are some secondary results for which economies will have to accommodate, evidence for a great climate threat is overstated. The evidence does not reach the level of “extraordinary evidence” to justify claims of a “climate crisis” or demands for the effective end of modern civilization and the abandonment of capitalism and the prohibition of fossil fuels.Once again, research has shown that the Trudeau administration is a very poor manager of public risk, promulgating policies that often do more harm than good both socially and individually. Their governmental actions frequently violate individual rights and personal autonomy. The government's misuse of probabilistic risk models in managing risks, ranging from air pollution, chemical exposure to climate change and most recently, to biological threats such as COVID-19, completely discredits this regime.